Education

Education with Emulab

Education with Emulab

One of Emulab's primary goals is to support education: it provides a laboratory
in which students can have complete control of a contained environment, which
encourages exploration and experimentation.

Why Emulab is Valuable for Education

Emulab cleans up after experiments; when a user
releases their nodes, their operating systems are re-installed before being passed
on to the next user. This means that students can have full "root" access on the nodes,
enabling coursework that involves normally destructive work such as kernel modifications.
Emulab is a forgiving environment: all nodes have network power control and most have
serial consoles, so when an experiment goes wrong, it's easy to examine why, and get
nodes back to a working state.

Because experiments in Emulab are isolated from
one another, multiple students can do their classwork simultaneously without fear of
disturbing other experiments with high volumes of network traffic, etc.
Emulab provides a consistent environment; an instructor can provide an NS file
for all students to use and know that they all get the same network topology and
installed software.

Emulab's collaboration tools (mailing lists, wikis, instant messaging, etc.) can be used by
students to collaborate on
class projects. Its account system has been designed to allow professors to
delegate privileged tasks to TAs, and its group system was created specifically
with class projects in mind.

Because the Emulab facility at Utah (along with many other Emulabs) is open, free of
charge, to educators at other institutions, it gives instructors and students access
to a world-class lab regardless of their own institution's budget